It was all Shevchenko in the early going. The Polish contender utilized her strength and positioning to get inside on Joanna and secure a few slamming takedowns. Jedrzejczyk did get back to her feet, but Shevchenko made her pay with spinning kicks to the body and front kicks to the face.

Shevchenko did fade a bit in the later rounds which allowed Joanna to tally some points on the scorecards, but it was simply too late. Shevchenko was the better and more effective fighter throughout this championship bout and proved that 125 pounds is really the best division for her.

Check out the full fight video highlights above courtesy of UFC.

With this performance, Shevchenko becomes the new UFC women’s flyweight champion. Her skill set is tailor made to reign supreme atop the 125-pound throne for a long time so it will be interesting to see who she takes on next

According to Johnson, the decision had been brewing for years, and it didn’t matter how entertaining he was as champion.

“I mean they were talking about closing it two years ago,” Johnson said recently. “It’s not the first time they’ve ever brought it up, you know? They were talking about closing when I was a champion, and I was like ‘okay, it is what it is…

“The UFC was planning on getting rid of flyweight division when I was the champion — finishing people, not taking people to decision, finishing people.”

You must now take all the 125lbers that have been let go, Chatri.You talk all of this Martial Art and respect talk, yet your greed has directly cost more than half a fighting division it’s chance to earn income for their family. Have respect @YODCHATRI. Sign the division.

“If he’s worried flyweights losing their jobs, I’m pretty sure he has a huge stake in the UFC company now,. I’m sure he can go to Dana, and be like Dana, ‘Keep these guys, these guys are fucking amazing. Let’s try to do this right. Let’s try to promote them.’ Facilitate a meeting of those who can [change things], with Proper Whiskey. ‘Let’s sit down and have a good talk.’ I’m sure he could come up with something if he really wanted to do it.”

“As I said, that’s Conor’s opinion of what he thinks should happen. This is a guy who just business, you know, the Barclay’s Center [thing], throwing the dolly in the bus, hurting multiple people. I truly think he doesn’t care. But that’s just my personal opinion.”

He’ll do fookin’ nothing to save the flyweights, as it turns out. Some of the released 125-pounders have been scooped up by ONE; others have landed in RIZIN. Hopefully they will be more appreciated on foreign soil than they were by fans and the UFC in the United States.

Insomnia

Prayers and good thoughts to Cub Swanson’s kids, who have been in the hospital all week.

Been in the hospital with the boys all weekend. King is a little worse than Saint but both are doing good. They just had trouble breathing and are on oxygen. Hopefully they will be released by the end of the week pic.twitter.com/IclhoyQo33

This Boeing fighter-bomber was too late to make it to WW2 but its engine was so powerful that the designers opted for two contra-rotating propeller blades to offset the torque.

I’m still on an obscure firearms kick, and Russia has a lot of them. Here’s an upside-down pistol so accurate they banned it in international competition shooting… and according to the internet, the designer was blind.

In just a few short months, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Flyweight division will more than likely come to an end after nearly seven years. Division “G.O.A.T.” Demetrious Johnson has already been traded to ONE FC in exchange for Ben Askren, half the division has been bumped up to Bantamweight, and the other half has been cut.

Flyweights get a massive amount of heat for being “small,” despite being the same size as a boxing Featherweight. They get heat for being “boring,” despite giving us the likes of Ben Nguyen, Tim Elliott, and arguably one of the organization’s most entertaining fighters in Deiveson Figueiredo. Are there bad Flyweight fights and bad Flyweight fighters? Of course, but look at the rest of UFC — the Light Heavyweight division is a graveyard outside the Top 5, women’s Bantamweight is dead in the water, and 90 percent of Heavyweight fights are a coin flip between stunning early finishes and two extremely large, extremely out-of-breath men wheezing circles around each other for 15 minutes.

And Lord knows the 125-pound division didn’t get half the push those did. For the first half of the year, there wasn’t a single non-title Flyweight bout on a UFC main card. UFC bemoaned the lack of interest in Demetrious Johnson’s title defenses despite putting no effort toward promoting his opposition while they were working their way through the ranks.

“People don’t care about small fighters” doesn’t hold water when HBO’s Superfly series, which pitted elite 115-pound boxers against each other, did great numbers. Or when the World Boxing Super Series’ Bantamweight (118-pound) tournament is doing similarly well, helmed by one of the greatest knockout artists alive in Naoya Inoue.

In the past, I’ve “given thanks” for specific fights and fighters. This time, though, I want to show my appreciation for both the UFC Flyweights — who busted their asses with no support whatsoever — and the up-and-coming 125-pounders on the regional and international scenes who just saw their dreams crushed on a whim.

Listen? Do you hear that? That’s the sound of a bunch of tiny voices crying out in unison? No, no one is nuking the Shire and the Keebler Elf Cookie Factory. It’s the UFC men’s flyweight division, which may be shutting down soon.

If you’ll recall, the UFC traded longtime “star” Demetrious Johnson to ONE Championship, and though reigning champ Henry Cejudo is still alive and kicking at 125 pounds, just about everyone else in the division has been handed pink slips. Now there’s even news that bantamweight king TJ Dillashaw will be moving down to face Cejudo, maybe even become a double-champ (which is all the rage these days).

Dillashaw is cool about being a kind of divisional hitman. He said as much on Ariel Helwani’s show yesterday. As per MMAFighting:

“The UFC wants to get rid of the division and they hired me to go down and close it and get another belt in the process,” Dillashaw said.

“It’s a win-win for me. They’re paying me a f*ck-load of money to move down and kill the 125-pound division and collect a second belt. So, it’s game time.”

But while all signs point to the UFC dissolving the flyweight division after the Cejudo-Dillashaw superfight, there has still been no official word that that’s the plan. Over the weekend, UFC President Dana White even suggested that they are “working on some things right now with that division” though he didn’t elaborate on what those things are. But for Dillashaw, it all seems pretty clear once he beats Cejudo.

“It seems like I’m gonna take it over, man,” said Dillashaw. “I mean, if I’m the champ in both weight classes, why even have it? All the attention is at 135 anyway so at the end of the day, make the guys that they believe should stick around, come up and challenge for the belt.”

Really, we shouldn’t weep too much for a weight class that no one really cared for. But still, there are some tough 125 pounders out there, not even counting “Mighty Mouse” and Cejudo. Hopefully everyone cut loose lands somewhere nice.